Climbing on furniture and talking too much could lead to a psychiatric diagnosis for your child

This screening of toddlers has been attempted before. Between 2012-2015, there was an attempt to screen all 3-year-olds for mental illness by expanding an existing physical check performed by GPs to include screening for "mental illness."

Symptoms checked for included whether the child was fidgety, easily distracted, acted as if driven by a motor and doesn't listen to rules. The expanded check was scrapped in 2015 due to immense public criticism from professionals and general public.

Psychiatrist Allen Frances, the DSM–IV Task Force Chair, slammed it, calling the screening "reckless", not evidence-based, predicting it could lead to an explosion of false diagnoses with youngsters labelled with mental illness when they didn't have one and drugged.

The Productivity Commission said during their recent mental health inquiry, that there is no adequate data to assess whether increased focus on infant emotional wellbeing in the past has had a substantial effect on young children and their families.

$500,000 has now been allocated to write national early childhood mental health guidelines so that states and territories can add subjective screening for mental illness and emerging mental illness into existing early childhood checks. This mental health screening must be stopped.

Government funding cannot be spent on hocus-pocus predictions that place children at physical risk.